ONE OF THE MILLIONS’ MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024
“This is an astonishingly accomplished novel…Just stunning.” – Kirkus Reviews, ★ Starred review
“Magnificent” – Publisher’s Weekly, ★ Starred review
A stirring, unsparing novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student that “reads like a direct communication from the soul,” –Justin Torres, author of Blackouts
After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life…read more
the author
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, Kimbilio, & Breadloaf, though he is now the Anisfield-Wolf Fellow at the CSU Poetry Center. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories: Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is also an associate faculty member at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as Director of Programs at Blue Stoop, a literary hub for Philly writers.
“A brilliant coming-of-age story.”
—New York Times
“Thomas is a skilled prose stylist, and Sink is loaded with arresting imagery and insights into the eerie space between claustrophobia and freedom unique to childhood.”
―Vulture
"[A] wrenching debut. . .Thomas’s prose delivers an emotional gut punch. . .The result is a lyrical exploration of identity and survival."
―Publishers Weekly
“A fearless debut that will change your life.”—Debutiful
“Sink is a singular memoir; all blood and nerve and near-unbearable beauty. A brilliant and fucking fearless debut.”―Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House
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